Symfony vs Laravel : Which PHP framework to choose?

One of the toughest challenges of development projects is building quality websites and applications in the least possible time. This is why programmers across the globe prefer to use PHP frameworks. However, there are many frameworks available  in which Symfony and Laravel stand out with few of it’s amazing features. This brings in the topic Symfony vs Laravel , Which PHP framework to choose?

Related: Top 12 PHP Frameworks For Startup Web Development

Symfony vs Laravel : Similarities before the war-

Before we start discussing about Symfony vs Laravel i.e. the differences, let’s first see what they have in common. As both of them are from the same background as in PHP, there are many crucial features which are present in both of them.

After a thorough research at ValueCoders we found, Symfony and Laravel  both support Scaffolding and full text search. Cross platform features and acceptance of multilingual content are also common in both of them. Take a look at the image which tells more about the similarities.

Now as you know the common features of Symfony and Laravel let’s see what Symfony has to offer specifically. Symfony vs Laravel

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Symfony vs Laravel

Symfony as a PHP framework is well suited for large-scale or complex enterprise level projects. It is a quite stable framework. Symfony 3.1 (the current version) helps developers create scalable websites that are flexible to changing business requirements. Symfony can work with some of the largest open source platforms such as PHPBB, Piwik, and Drupal.

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Here are some other key advantages of Symfony development features –

       1) There are many easy scalability options available in Symfony. With optimizing Propels,  Limiting the number of objects to hydrate, Minimizing the number of  queries with joins and avoid using temporary arrays Symfony promises high scalability.

         2) If Symfony is implemented well, then its speed is the sum of the individual speeds of all the features it includes. Or, from a different angle, Symfony’s speed is the consequence of a series of choices that you made to decide whether a feature should make it to the core or not. Hence, Symfony is faster than many other PHP frameworks  if you use properly.

       3) It is adaptive to cuser’s needs and offers optimum performance. Symfony2 introduced  unique HTTP and HTTP cache handling by being an HTTP-centric request/response framework. Also it increases performance by allowing full use of advance features like ESI for separating the different parts of your page/application.

        4) Symfony provides reusable component  reducing overhead costs. There are many reusable components that will make your life easier. You can check some of it’s best practices here.

Read More: Advantages of using Symfony PHP framework for development

Laravel vs Symfony

Laravel is a PHP framework purely meant for developing MVC based applications. It is an open source PHP framework that is known to be the finest of the PHP frameworks.

Read More: Laravel: an open source PHP framework

Here are some of the key advantages of developing with Laravel:

1) PHP Framework Laravel helps with enforcing constraints between multiple database objects with the helps of an advanced query builder mechanism. Apart from that, it provides an easy version control system that helps with simplified management of migrations.

2) The framework has an auto-loading facility and does not need manual maintenance and inclusion paths. Also  it helps in generating new tools with the help of an IoC container.

3)  Authentication is one the few important parts of any web development project.  With Laravel, authentication is much simpler as it  contains the ready to use inbuilt authentication system. You just need to configure database migrations, controllers , models, and views to make the system work.

4)  Until now, developers were bound to declare application events as a string. However, you can declare new events in the application using “event object” with Laravel .  The event objects created using php artisan make:event <event-name> & event header object using php artisan handler:event <handler-name>. You can fire the events using Event::fire(new Event(params)) once you create any new event. This makes it much easier and faster.

The bottom line of Symfony vs Laravel PHP Framework

 When finalizing your decision let us remind  it is never about the number of features that a particular framework provides. It’s about the actual functionality of the framework and how the functionalities can be utilized within your own web development project.  Hence, choose one the  frameworks as per your project needs and save time and cost.